Faust im Arsch

Punchdrunk’s hugely successful Faust at 21 Wapping Lane will soon come to an end. What was it about this ‘immersive’ theatre event that proved so popular with London audiences? To the extent of sell-out performances at £25 a ticket? Following his first article for London Theatre Blog, ‘Panzerfaust‘, London-based writer and Journalist, Patrick Judd, revisited Faust and offers his reappraisal here.

Life is mostly tranquil here at sea level. We spawn upstream in Islington and die downstream in Richmond. True, most of us lose our battles with cancer without ever having put a foot on the property ladder but this is a small price to pay to be alive in the dying glow of the Pax Americana.

I accept that there may be no reason for my existence. I gratefully acknowledge and honour imaginary Gods and their strange ways in my own strange way. There may be no broad sunlit uplands, no light at the end of the tunnel nor any tunnel either. Like Goethe’s Faust, I have failed to gain an understanding of the underlying pattern of the universe which seems to be there just for the taking. I could, like our own modern shamans, the men in white coats, develop a familiarity of the forces binding atom to atom, planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy. I could even harness those forces in a thousand useful ways: novel kitchen appliances, levitation made simple or a money growing tree perhaps. I could do all this and yet I would fail to gain knowledge. This is what I share in common with Faust.

Our incantations serve as elevator music to a cosmic maelstrom which mocks even the best crafted performance. Our mumbo jumbo is at best a side-show; our voo-doo a farce Punchdrunk’s Faust is no exception.

I went to see it again. Determined this time to rip its entrails out and read the omens scattered amongst the deconstructed scenes of Goethe’s twisted story. Who is this bastard Mephistopheles who swings from the the drainage pipes and concrete pillars of a fucked building in Wapping? Who is this impotent magician, this Dr Faust, who mocks us all by effortlessly turning into a young man. He has no right to do this and no contract even bound with blood should give us the hope that such a thing is possible. Even in jest. Even to entertain. How dare they pretend? Why do we pretend to believe them for £25? Why was I there again running like a fool up stairs and through candle-lit corridors? Why is there no answer? Why can’t I ask the right questions?

But the hopeless beauty of it. I felt the mystery as the fake preacher booted me out onto the second floor. Again for a minute I was in the nowhere. The hum of London faded. My guard dropped. My journey began and some echoes of Goethe’s story sounded clearly: Fausts’ study, Walpurgisnacht, a forest at night, a dirty witch’s kitchen. I stole sweets and laughed at some of the bloody fools running after the performers with their plastic death masks like little clockwork wind-up toys. I sprawled in a leather seat in a fake cinema and watched a few scenes of an oiled young Charlton Heston slide his way across the screen in black and white. Still no answers but for a while I didn’t feel like asking any questions.

And make no mistake, a question is at the heart of Faust: will Mephistopheles, the one time angel, be able to turn Dr Faust away from the light of reason? In other words from God? Will Dr Faust, the honourable citizen, the charlatan, turn his back on the God of the Enlightenment and seek love by the light of perverted science? Do I care? Yes.

Lend me your ears dunces: I need more smoke screens and mirrors. I need agile performers who excel in their craft. There is a chimera which will lead me to the promised land of perfect geometry and justice. There will come a time when Mephistopheles will come to claim me wearing one of his countless guises and somehow I will need the accumulated knowledge, the theatrical memory of the human species, to escape his trap and fade, fade, fade away. If not to heaven then at least at peace. Thank you Punchdrunk. Go now and sin no more.